Happy Fourth!

It was a fun and busy day to celebrate our country's birthday! We started with a church picnic breakfast, and truth be told it is one of Andy's very favorite activities. You will see why shortly... We put everyone in red or blue; Ben chose his favorite cowboy outfit (a red FLANNEL shirt! with jeans, cowboy duds and trusty canteen) and used his hat to shade his face... Here he is getting on his horse. All the kids love this climbing apparatus.
Moms love that it can handle several kids at a time with room enough for all!
This is Annie and her friend Brynnley. We did a little photo shoot with the two of them because they were having so much fun playing!
Emily enjoyed swinging over and over and over again....

So, I looked over to find these two little munchkins without their shoes and climbing on the top of the tube slide. I have shoe issues (one must always wear them outside!!!) and Annie knows that, so she and B went climbing back up inside the slide. It took me a few minutes to convince them I only wanted to take a few pictures.

They are quite silly together!
Annie with B's little brother - riding away on his horse!
This is why Andy LOVES this church activity - an on-going game of Ultimate Frisbee with old out-of-shape men (the 30+ group) and the teenagers, who have the speed and the energy but lack the years of practice. They start with a little bit of football and then bring out the Frisbee. Andy would LOVE to bring out the soccer ball also, but that's not so popular down here...

Then we went to my mom's to swim and eat. This is Emily with Baby Claire - her favorite friend who she gets quite giddy about seeing! On the table you will see the most fabulous roasted corn and black bean salsa dip that my friend Farrah makes! If I was really good at technology I would give you a link to her blog for the recipe, but I'm not. Sorry. Really sorry because it is pretty much a little bit of heaven on earth!

Ben and my mom worked on painting when Ben needed a pool break. He and Andy made this last weekend, and he took it to Grandma's because she has birds living in a nest in her backyard.

Annie has learned to go off the diving board by herself - WITHOUT a life jacket! She is like a little daredevil and just jumps right off! Here is the succession of her swimming.

We sure missed the rest of our family, and the day would have been more perfect if we'd had some cousins here too! We were finally able to finish off our Independence Day with Andy's other favorite activity - fireworks! The last few years we've had to leave with Ben in hysterics because the fireworks scare him so much. Not this year! He did great!!!

Now I need to run and check on Ben and Annie. They are playing 'Mommy and Daddy' and somehow Aunt Nancy is cooking dinner, and I know how scary that can be!!! :)